The Legacy of British Rule On LGBT Rights In Jamaica and the Cayman Islands

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via funding of human rights initiatives, the use of orders-in-council to alter local law in the territory, the application of European court rulings, British control of the police force, and other factors, the United Kingdom’s connection to the British Overseas Territories such as the Cayman Islands has helped to spread its human rights agenda to these territories

Undergraduate Catalogue 2007-2009

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1005/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate Catalogue 2005-2007

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1006/thumbnail.jp

Accurate and budget-efficient text, image, and video analysis systems powered by the crowd

Crowdsourcing systems empower individuals and companies to outsource labor-intensive tasks that cannot currently be solved by automated methods and are expensive to tackle by domain experts. Crowdsourcing platforms are traditionally used to provide training labels for supervised machine learning algorithms. Crowdsourced tasks are distributed among internet workers who typically have a range of skills and knowledge, differing previous exposure to the task at hand, and biases that may influence their work. This inhomogeneity of the workforce makes the design of accurate and efficient crowdsourcing systems challenging. This dissertation presents solutions to improve existing crowdsourcing systems in terms of accuracy and efficiency. It explores crowdsourcing tasks in two application areas, political discourse and annotation of biomedical and everyday images. The first part of the dissertation investigates how workers' behavioral factors and their unfamiliarity with data can be leveraged by crowdsourcing systems to control quality. Through studies that involve familiar and unfamiliar image content, the thesis demonstrates the benefit of explicitly accounting for a worker's familiarity with the data when designing annotation systems powered by the crowd. The thesis next presents Crowd-O-Meter, a system that automatically predicts the vulnerability of crowd workers to believe \enquote{fake news} in text and video. The second part of the dissertation explores the reversed relationship between machine learning and crowdsourcing by incorporating machine learning techniques for quality control of crowdsourced end products. In particular, it investigates if machine learning can be used to improve the quality of crowdsourced results and also consider budget constraints. The thesis proposes an image analysis system called ICORD that utilizes behavioral cues of the crowd worker, augmented by automated evaluation of image features, to infer the quality of a worker-drawn outline of a cell in a microscope image dynamically. ICORD determines the need to seek additional annotations from other workers in a budget-efficient manner. Next, the thesis proposes a budget-efficient machine learning system that uses fewer workers to analyze easy-to-label data and more workers for data that require extra scrutiny. The system learns a mapping from data features to number of allocated crowd workers for two case studies, sentiment analysis of twitter messages and segmentation of biomedical images. Finally, the thesis uncovers the potential for design of hybrid crowd-algorithm methods by describing an interactive system for cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy videos, based on a prediction model that determines when automated cell tracking algorithms fail and human interaction is needed to ensure accurate tracking

Undergraduate Catalogue 2017-2019

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1000/thumbnail.jp

A gendered analysis of teaching employment in Pakistan

This thesis aims to identify the relationships, structures and actors shaping the gender composition of the teaching workforce in Pakistan, with attention to the societal (or macro) level and through the experiences and interpretations of women and of men employed in school teaching and in higher education. In addition, the thesis compares the rewards of teaching for men and for women in different sectors of education and at different levels, and explores women and men teachers’ perceptions of the status of the teaching profession. The methodological approach is that of a multi-level analysis, so as to understand women teachers’ experiences of employment in the education sector at different levels as well as those of male teachers within the broader cultural, political and economic context of Pakistan. The thesis draws on secondary data sources including published research, statistical employment data and documentary evidence to address state policy in respect to education provision and employment policies and practices in public and private educational institutions. The original data is collected through semi-structured interviews – 70 in total - with women and men school teachers and university faculty in Lahore.The findings demonstrate that the feminisation of teaching is relative, not absolute in Pakistan. The private teaching sector is feminised to a larger extent and the public sector remains male-dominated. Women and men referred to teaching as respectable employment for women, which cohered with societal expectations of women and conserved the propriety of the household. Working hours in the teaching profession were thought of as accommodative of women’s ‘homemaker’ role and an incentive, for men, to hold multiple paid job-roles. Pay, while commonly thought of as inadequate for teachers in general, was typically better in the public sector compared to the private sector. The occupational status of teaching varied in respect to the level of teaching and sector. The public sector with standard pre-service credential requirements and career advancement opportunities is seen as a better employer compared to the private sector. On the one hand, the feminisation of teaching depicts gender segregation of society while associating teaching with ‘women’s work’. On the other hand, it presents women with an opportunity to gain entry into a socially and culturally respected and accepted profession while empowering them through reducing their economic dependability

Undergraduate Catalogue 2015-2017

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1001/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate Catalogue 2013-2015

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1002/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate Catalogue 2011-2013

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/undergraduatecatalogues/1003/thumbnail.jp

Educational influences on student academic attainment: a multi-level analysis in the context of Bangladesh

Bangladesh has made significant progress in terms of improving student access and gender disparity at primary and secondary levels of education. Currently, the major concern is the quality of education. In the national interest, the government of Bangladesh has undertaken a number of intervention programmes to increase the quality of primary and secondary education. Recently, researchers and practitioners are more engaged in investigating the quality of education, particularly at primary and secondary levels, where they have focused on the following themes: • internal efficiency • achievement of basic competency • acquisition of terminal competencies • teacher education • private expenditure on education There has been little application of School Effectiveness Research (SER) in Bangladesh, though SER became one of the most important educational movements and discourses in the West and came to prominence very rapidly in other developed and developing countries, namely Australia, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, China and India. Therefore, the current study is significant in that it explores contemporary issues in the Bangladesh education system, which influence student academic attainment and present the findings of the first school effectiveness study in Bangladesh using multi-level analysis. Reviewing SER in other developed and developing countries, I discuss the status of SER in Bangladesh. This is followed by an assessment of the education system, educational management and policy making procedure at secondary level in Bangladesh to aid readers’ understanding. Different perspectives of what constitutes ‘school effectiveness’ are illustrated, in the light of important issues such as models and the theory of SER, effect size, consistency and stability. Various criticisms of SER are also illustrated, along with a number of counterpoints to justify the importance of SER. The significant methodological aspect (i.e. multi-level analysis with ‘value added’ approach) is introduced, along with other different types of statistical analysis, for example, descriptive and cross tabulation (chi-square) analysis and exploratory factor analysis. The normalised public examination scores of 2,462 students nested into 90 classes and 45 schools are analysed by means of multi-level modelling. The multi-level analysis of the data shows that most of the variations were found at the student level. A significant proportion of variations was also found at class level accounting for prior attainment, background factors and some class level process factors implying that teacher effect on pupil attainment is greater than school effect. It is argued that it is possible to construct a model of school effectiveness in the Bangladeshi setting. The findings of my research indicate that factors external to the schools are more important than school level factors for academic attainment. Student academic attainment and academic self-concept were found to be positively correlated. The interrelation between the two variables is significantly higher at school level than at class and student levels. A significant proportion of variation in academic attainment was found to be at class level, implying that teachers ‘make the difference’, not schools and that the teachers who teach individual classes within the school are the key factors for effective teaching and learning outcome. Finally, the policy implications of my findings are discussed and a framework is proposed for measuring school effectiveness in Bangladesh